Author: Zarrin Fatima
Redesigned by: Carla Alvarez Gonzalez
What if your neighbor was the key to a better, greener community?
The purpose of Nappi Naapur is to increase real encounters between people who live close to each other. It is intended for neighborly help, getting to know each other, gig work and promoting the sharing economy. Everyone is welcome to become a user! However, children under the age of 13 need to be accompanied by a guardian who monitors that the use is safe.
In Nifty Neighbor you can meet people near you - people you would not otherwise know. You can ask help for taking your dog out, find friends for your children, borrow tools, offer fishing company, help your neighbor, and find someone to appreciate receiving the leftover of their family dinner.
Nifty Neighbor is a map and location based social web service. In Nifty, everyone has their own location, home, on the map. It is close to other homes, and everyone can send messages on the map, and answer to other people's messages. People can meet each other, with their needs and resources. Communication is positive. People ask and get help, they employ each other, get to meet each other, and create projects together. Neighborhoods become generally nicer places.
Context of the case study
Nifty Neighbor does not have a direct organized relation to climate neutrality. The users are free to use the service as they see most useful and interesting. However, sharing economy (e.g. lending utensils to neighbours), avoiding food waste and ride sharing are among the topics seen in the service.
Nifty Neighbor could contribute to behaviour change, climate communication and new forms of collaboration and ways to organize activities.[1] This is because it is a way of meet new people and also find out what types of activities they have going on. This could lead to a conversation about energy saving equipment at home or car-pooling.
An innovative approach
- Co-creation & prototyping new approaches
- Funding new approaches
Key enablers
- Economic: Initial financing from crowdfunding, awards and project funding, non-profit running the service
- Social: Mission of the non-profit to promote participatory society; Interest of citizens for communal activities and sharing economy
- Technical: Digital capabilities of the initiator; Location-based service; Easy UI
Key inhibiting factors
- Economic: Continuous funding may be required for maintenance and further development of the service, but also for boosting communality and thus use of the service
- Social: Lack of interest from citizens, competing solutions (other social media groups)
- Technical: A separate solution from other daily social media use
Main positive lessons
- Successful crowdfunding for implementation
- Easy to use and low threshold to join, open to all
- Builds completely on voluntariness and spontaneity, flexible, non-binding
- Thousands of people joined the platform and offered their help to those neighbors in vulnerable positions in a special Corona Help category that was established in 2020 (https://futures-project.org/project/nappi-naapuri/)
Main barriers found
- Having too few users in a neighborhood hampers the potential benefits of the service. Difficult to reach sufficient number of active users. May be necessary to engage an existing community or to launch a pilot to gain active use, also to ‘recruit’ someone to organise occasional events and campaigns.
- Reliability and privacy may be of concern (e.g. how to ensure it’s safe for an elderly to meet a person offering to help)
Potential for reapplication and scale-up
Basically the service can already be used anywhere by anyone. However, a critical mass of users living in the same area/neigbourhood is necessary to create active communication and sufficient scale so that offers and requests on the platform would reach interested users.
All images on this site are sourced from tfp-global.org.
Credits:
Creado con una imagen de Artem - "view of the city"